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Saturday March 05, 2005

Omni - where are they now? (July 1990)

Two more Continuum articles:

He Sweeps, he Scrubs, but how's his French? Short piece on a fully automated cleaning robot called Cab-X that has just been introduced to the Paris metro system to help keep the pavements clean. Cab-X is six feet tall and weighs in at about 200 pounds, gets its power from a battery pack and moves on tank-like treads. He's guided by clusters of magnetic discs embedded in the station's pavement and by an artificial vision system, that allows him to avoid such obstacles as scurrying passengers.
Seems Cab-X was still around in 1997 according to a report entitled Reality of robotics in the European Cleaning Journal, with its lease renewed for ten years in 1996.
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Lab: Did you know that spider silk is more elastic than nylon and five times as strong as steel? Molecular biologist Randy Lewis at the University of Wyoming says that spider silk would be ideal for sutures, artificial ligaments, aircraft carriers' catch cables, body armor, wet suits and even space suits. Lewis predicts that super silk should be available for experimentation in about a year.
Looks like it took a little longer than that according to this January 14th 2005 National Geographic article. "Hopefully in the next month we'll start spinning fibers" says Lewis, who is now a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming. Hmmm. Perhaps we should check in with Randy in another fifteen years.